Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/68

62 incredible. It will hardly be thought incredible now. For this great rebellion, by which the Commonwealth was brought to the verge of destruction, not a single life has been taken. Wirtz, the only man who has been executed, suffered not for his part in the rebellion, but for thousands of murders. Mr. Davis is still awaiting his trial; but nobody imagines that he will be put to death. Confiscation was suspended over the heads of the Southern oligarchy for a time: but they have suffered no personal punishment, though they have lost slavery, the stake of the desperate game which they had played with the blood of so many thousands. Oligarchs too must pay, when they play at rebellion and lose the game. The Southerners are called upon to accept the system which has been pronounced by overwhelming authority to be alone compatible with Christianity, morality, and industrial prosperity: this is the penalty which they have to undergo for the most criminal and dangerous attempt ever made not only against a single Commonwealth, but against the CommowealthCommonwealth [sic] of Man. There are some who doubt the wisdom of this all embracing mercy. It is as profoundly wise as it is noble and full of high instruction to mankind. Its wisdom will not be the less manifest, even though the South should fail to be touched by it, and provoke measures of severity, which then would have the moral approbation of the whole world.

We were led to believe that while the South was all dignity and self-sacrifice, the North was revelling in a ghastly and almost fiendish whirl of gaiety and dissipation. It no doubt was so among a certain set at New York, in the vortex of contracts and gambling speculation. But elsewhere I can bear witness that it was not. Elsewhere